How to attract and convert your perfect customers

How do you attract your perfect customers? It’s the million pound marketing question. The answer is: by grabbing their attention. But rather than using big headlines and buzzwords to do so, I’ll be sharing a different approach. One that will ensure you speak to the right people using the right language.

Often, products or services are named after a broad generic end result they achieve, rather than the dilemma that would lead to the sale. Like a drink offering refreshment rather than a great tasting way to quench your thirst while on the go. The fact is, consumers don’t always recognise their own ‘refreshment’ needs, so their buying signals may not be triggered by this alone. In other words, we don’t want to broadcast what we can solve as your audience may not recognise the problem – we need to refer to specific symptoms. 

Think of it like visiting the doctor, you don’t go in and ask ‘do you have a cure for XYZ?’. You explain what the symptoms are, and a diagnosis is made.

Let’s look at the steps you need to take to understand your perfect customers’ pain points and attract them to your product or service.

Identify who your perfect customer is and what issues they are facing

Before anything else, it’s important to really understand who your ideal customer is and what problems you are solving for them. It is common for this to shift and evolve over the years you are in business so you will need to assess your perfect customer periodically. Remember that marketing should offer solutions to your potential consumers in an appealing, enticing, and straightforward way, always underpinned by your brand purpose.

Ask yourself the following questions to build a customer profile; what challenges does your product or service address? What type of person benefits? What are your customer’s goals? What are their buying habits, their aspirations, needs, and fears? Next, analyse the data you have available to you. This includes your analytics, location of current customers and their demographics, feedback, market research interviews, and what you can garner from forums and social media your customers are on.

By building a full picture of your perfect customers, you can understand how you are helping them and thus what you should be focusing on in your marketing language.

Review your current customer’s needs

Next, you need to understand how your current consumers’ behaviours have shifted due to coronavirus. Undoubtedly, our priorities and how we spend our money has changed. Look at your Google analytics over recent months and compare year on year, what are people looking at and how did they reach your website? Check which pages have the lowest exit rate and dwell time as this indicates what your clients are interested in. Have a look at how the demographics of your website visitors have changed. Are they older or younger than pre-pandemic? Has the balance between male and female visitors altered?

Importantly, are customers visiting your website via organic search or is there a strong referral partner? These website visitors depict your lowest hanging fruit so you can take enormous clues from who they are to make your messaging more engaging to your core interest groups.

Track site visitor behaviour and crucially, look at conversions, not traffic volume. What’s important is to identify where prospective customers are turning into sales. So, your mission critical task should be to ensure tracking codes and conversion goals are firing correctly on your website analytics.

Understand your first point of contact

The way customers find you is likely to have pivoted since you first started your business. Knowing where your customer journey begins means you know where to maximise your online or print marketing presence. Start with search, not social and focus on search engines whether that’s Google, YouTube, or one of the many other routes.

Have a full Search Engine Optimisation site audit and check out not only how healthy your site and search set up is but how you are ranking for your primary services and what the keyword terms are that you should be optimising. You need to make it as easy as possible for your perfect customer to find you and SEO is the best way to do this. Understanding your top keyword terms is also very valuable for refining your messaging. 

Make a great first impression

Depending on where your customer journey begins, ensure that your first impression is on point, so that you aren’t losing customers to competition. 

Your website is your online shop front and I suggest getting a great website designer that specialises in brand development on board to make sure it is hitting all the right notes. It is critical that each page of your website has a specific purpose and targets keyword terms to ensure the relevance of content and quality in the eyes of Google’s algorithms.

I cannot stress enough the power of organic listings on Google as here is where many first impressions will take place. Search is an opportunity to create mini ads that elevate your results so you appear on page one, and there is also the option to craft the automated messages that are seen with your listings so that they match with your target audience.

Speak directly to your perfect customers

Once you have a wider view of what your customers are doing in their new lived experiences of seeking your products or services we can understand their pain points, rather than talking about the end result you provide. What are the symptoms your consumers will experience in order for them to need your product or service?

The most direct way to speak to your perfect customers is through an editorial awareness piece on your website. Here, you can focus on your lowest hanging fruit, their demographic, business sector and their day-to-day issues and symptoms in a really specific way. This will resonate with them and capture their attention. 

You may need to tackle different business sectors in different articles to ensure that you are being super targeted and really resonating with your audience – start with the largest group first.

Remember to include a relevant client quote with a tangible problem they couldn’t overcome that your perfect prospect is also facing. Do not talk about products or services, instead, talk about difficulties and a pathway to a solution, and the support you’ll provide – essentially what the ‘treatment-plan’ looks like.

After all, you are selling prospective buyers something they were clueless they needed. So, it’s the storytelling piece that will raise awareness and inspire the need for a solution.

Once your educational piece is out there resonating with prospective audiences and elevating awareness, then it’s time to create an actual ad as the sales tool. Here you can include a testimonial from a very happy and fulfilled client who’s experienced the ‘benefit’. Sometimes this could be the sum of your ad with a strong call to action.

Any ads you create should be mindful of the fulfilment path, and consider where the best place is to send enquiries so that prospective buyers don’t have to think too hard if they want to get in touch. 

In conclusion 

By following these steps, you will action everything you need to attract and convert your perfect customers – identifying who your perfect customer is and what issues they are facing, reviewing your current customer’s needs, understanding your first point of contact, making a great first impression, and speaking directly to your ideal consumer.

Some great tips on how to attract and convert your perfect customers. Do you understand the steps to take in order to speak directly to your ideal potential buyers?

If you crave support and clarity from a highly experienced, independent marketing consultant who can advise on what you should and should not be doing, help you establish and grow your business and attract the customers you deserve, please GET IN TOUCH.